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I remember my first glimpse of Garden Reach Depot. My aunt had managed to find an old black and white photograph, and had put it in her book about the migration, Survivors of Another Crossing. Inexplicably, the place looked familiar: I had a strange sense of having walked in there, once upon a dream, one rainy evening at sunset, with a lot of other people, heading straight for one of the thatched sheds where I squatted down and took shelter.
I was back to where it had all begun!
The start of our journey to Trinidad, as I see it, was not our individual exoduses from towns and villages of the heartland for a multitude of reasons: some of us shanghaied into bondage, some deceived by the recruiters’ assurances of returning rich, some fleeing famine, widows and reluctant brides running away to freedom, young men reacting too sharply to parental censure and slinking off, other more sanguine souls simply hoping for a new start. Some of these tales remain as hazy vignettes, incomplete history, re-worked and varnished over time to survive as family lore. When the old ones left their homes to move on, the notion of the awesome sweep of the journey ahead had not yet taken shape. It was still to be just a migration, not essentially different from the migrations within India that Bhojpuriya moglasiyas had been going on ever since they could remember. No, it was only after we had taken the train to Calcutta, and crossed a great river, the Hooghly, on the old pontoon bridge, that we reached a point of no return. For our ancestors, the jahajis, the real journey to the diaspora began in Calcutta, in Garden Reach Depot.
In our folklore there is a story, Rani Saranga ke Kheesa, about a young woman who crosses a river in order to be transformed, reaching a place on the other side where her new life begins. There, on the other bank of the river, she meets a prince who falls in love with her, and makes a hut for her where she will stay, looked after by attendants, until she is ready to move on and take her place by his side.
The moment when we came together as a community was when we all met at the depot, and hunkered down to wait for the monsoon to fill the Hooghly with water so that the big ships could pass more easily, more safely, skirting the sandbanks that kept shifting in the Sunderbans day by day. That was when the contacts that blossomed into the jahaji-bhai and jahaji-bahin relationship happened, at that early stage still known as dipwa-bhai and dipwa-bahin, family ties that have continued, for some, even to the present day. That is when our ancestors began to stretch their language skills, and reach beyond the tiny worlds defined by their village dialects and understand the Bhojpuri of the other migrants who would be their shipmates, long before it fused into a single code for the new generation. And that is where the distinctive diaspora cuisine was born, different from that of UP and Bihar, but something we still share in our far-flung homes.
It was in the depots that our ancestors first encountered white flour, maida. Sailor’s food that would not rot in the ships’ holds, it was brought from Europe to the ports of Calcutta and Cochin, where it was used to make the huge leavened multi-layered parathas, the only ones we know. And the translucent stuffed dalpuris, made of the same leavened white flour, the ‘rotis’ found all over the first diaspora and now even in the lands of the second diaspora, like Canada, to which many continued the jahaji journey.
The littis of Bihar, probably a later development after wheat cultivation began there, have no echo in the diaspora. Nor does one hear the Indian word atta in Trinidad: for us, flour was always white, and something new. We called it phoolaawa, a nice bilingual pun, that brings in the echo of phool, flower. Bhojpuri bursting into flower for a few brief generations, before we moved on to engage the West in their own languages, as equals.
We shared a depot with the migrants bound for Surinam. I remember once in Rotterdam remarking to a Surinamese friend that her family name sounded familiar, once I got past the Dutch spelling. I thought I had heard the same name in Trinidad. Then she told me a story, of two brothers who got separated at the depot, one finding himself on the boat to Trinidad while his brother got left behind, and was put on the next boat, to Suriname. Her great grandfather would shake his head sadly, she remembered, wondering what had become of his brother. He knew he must have reached Trinidad. Years later, the family took up the search, and found his brother’s descendants in
Trinidad.
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